The New S Language

This book provides documentation for a new version of the S system released in 1988. The New S Language enhances the features that have made S popular: interactive computing, flexible graphics, data management and a large collection of functions. The New S language features make possible new applications and higher-level programming, including a single unified language, user-defined functions as first-class objects, symbolic computations, more accurate numerical calculations and a new approach to graphics. S now provides direct interfaces to the powerful tool of the UNIX operating system and to algorithms implemented in Fortran and C.